Improve your pictures

[Garys]

http://tinyurl.com/3b93ev

Maybe one of the better photographers here (not me!) can comment on this. His pictures certainly do look good, so he seems to know what he's doing.

Gary

 

[FPrice]

Xavier usually has some good points. And I think he has some pretty good advice and techniques here. The thing to do is practise and try to take note of what seems to work and produce your best pictures.

 

[Garys]

Xavier usually has some good points. And I think he has some pretty good advice and techniques here. The thing to do is practise and try to take note of what seems to work and produce your best pictures.

Or hire Milsurps4me to take your pictures!

Gary

 

[SKS Ray]

Or hire Milsurps4me to take your pictures!

Gary

Why thank you.

 

[Snapshot]

Some of his points are good. Some sound good in theory but in practice... well... let's put it this way:

He acts as if he made an improvement when he switched to a "modern flat screen". Depending on what exactly he switched to, he most likely made a severe downgrade. CRTs while big and bulky still have better color representation and overall image quality then LCDs IMHO

He also says "good equipment is essential".... and then buys a "point and shoot". Not to knock "point and shoot"s because there are some good ones but if you have the money, there's a reason why SLRs are so popular with the pros. If you are going to tow the “good equipment” line then it would seem odd to me to be using a point and shoot.

My advice is that it's not necessarily about getting the best equipment BUT the better stuff you have the easier it will make your job as the photographer. Use the best that you can afford and only you can decide what is “best”.

I very much like his idea of not propping guns with stuff inserted in the trigger guard. Something about it just looks wrong. While most “good” photographs are staged in some form or another (even candids can be framed by the photographer for maximum effect) the purpose is to make it look as natural as possible. It’s kind of like acting. The sign of a good actor is NOT for you to believe that s/he did a good job of playing…say… a spy. The sign of a good actor is for you to believe that s/he IS a spy. The viewer should never be exposed to what went into making the shot happen.

All in all, his advice is good but where the pixel hits the screen, I’ve always liked pictures by the artist known as “Stickman” on the ar15 forums much better then the photos by this guy.

 

[Another_David]

A $10 tripod and natural sunlight works wonders.

Blurred photos are often from shaky hands. Off coloring or streaks are solved by avoiding flashes or indoor lights and using moderate sunlight. For bonus points, clean your camera lens with something other than you shirt! For most of these staged photos expensive equipment isn't really necessary if you can wait for good sunlight.

 

[SKS Ray]

I know crap about cameras when it comes to the techincal stuff. I've seen some of the camera gear guys have bought to the NES shoots and was blown away by it.
The camera I use is a Kodak Easy Share 5.0 point and shoot. It works for what I want but took a little getting used to for pictures. Keeping the flash off was one of the biggest things, and I haven't got around to getting a tripod yet so it takes me a few shots to get something steady.
When I want to take a pic of one of my guns I stick with those 2 things and always try for a background that I think goes with the gun or at least looks interesting like these 2.

One of these days maybe I'll upgarde to something that will give me better resolution and smoother lines. Its just that there is always a new gun I want that sucks up my money instead of putting it towards a better camera.

 

[Patriot]

I have the equipment but a lot of time I don't feel like setting it all up and just want to take
a photo to sell or to put a pic in one of the threads. This is my most recent one taken on
top of the washer/dryer combo with a D70 and a SB800 flash.

When I "set up" with a light box shooting in raw mode with no flash, post processing in PS, you
can really do some interesting stuff. All of these photos are in a much reduced resolution in order
to post them on the board. The original photos are about 4x-5x larger than these and at a much
higher resolution.

 

[SKS Ray]

Why is it that quality is lost when a picture is reduced in size? I notice on a lot of mine when I size them down using my HP Image Zone software that some of the lines look jagged and while the picture gets more vivid it also loses crisp lines.
But yet left alone they loo great. Take the one of my Romak 3 for example. I have that as my background on my PC and it looks 10x better than the resized image. Same goes for this shot:

On my end I see jagged lines on the top of the first rifle's bolt carrier and where the receiver meets the cover. Yet those aren't there when I have the image full size.

 

[Patriot]

Why is it that quality is lost when a picture is reduced in size?

Downsizing a picture is done by reducing the amount of pixels required to render a picture.

For instance if I take a pic in 'fine' jpg mode it takes the pic at a resolution of 300 DPI
(dots per inch) a very good picture rendering resolution. This means that I have over
90,000 dots per sq inch to render the image. Now when I go to display this image and I
want to keep the size down in order to not kill bandwidth for someone still using that 14.4K
modem, I will reduce it to 72 DPI or 5184 dpsi. That is roughly 5 percent of the original
resolution. Something has got to give and what gives is the detail in the image. No longer
do you have a five or ten pixel gradient along the edges since you lost that in the downsizing
and as a result have a one, maybe two pixel gradient in that detail. This is why you see the
'jaggies.' as they are called.

There is a lot more to it than this but this is the basics. Lower resolution images can be
enhanced to give the appearance of greater detail. Analog monitors will display 'nicer'
images in low resolution than digital monitors. In lower resolutions crappier monitors
actually will help as they will blur the pixels reducing the 'jaggies' by virtue of not being
able to render higher resolutions.

I notice on a lot of mine when I size them down using my HP Image Zone software that some of the lines look jagged and while the picture gets more vivid it also loses crisp lines.
But yet left alone they loo great. Take the one of my Romak 3 for example. I have that as my background on my PC and it looks 10x better than the resized image. Same goes for this shot:

On my end I see jagged lines on the top of the first rifle's bolt carrier and where the receiver meets the cover. Yet those aren't there when I have the image full size.

When it comes to digital imaging, image size matters to a point. Increasing image
size at some point gains very little in image quality as most displays can't do much
with the extra detail anyway.

 

[Supermoto]

http://tinyurl.com/3b93ev

Maybe one of the better photographers here (not me!) can comment on this. His pictures certainly do look good, so he seems to know what he's doing.

Gary

Not overly impressed with his work. The pictures still have a snap shot look to them, not much to draw the eye in and doesn't really tell a story.

BP's picture of the colt 1911 drawns your eye into the detail and weathering on the slide, the gun looks like it has stories to tell.

the one with the revolver has swooping lines that keeps your eye in the picture. your eye comes in from the bottom left, follows the lines to the gun and back around, it is a simple but visually interesting

 

[Patriot]

Why is it that quality is lost when a picture is reduced in size? I notice on a lot of mine when I size them down using my HP Image Zone software that some of the lines look jagged and while the picture gets more vivid it also loses crisp lines.
But yet left alone they loo great. Take the one of my Romak 3 for example. I have that as my background on my PC and it looks 10x better than the resized image. Same goes for this shot:

On my end I see jagged lines on the top of the first rifle's bolt carrier and where the receiver meets the cover. Yet those aren't there when I have the image full size.

Ray,

Does the HP software have an imaging feature called unsharp mask? If it does that is one
way to get some edge sharpness back in a low res picture. I have Photoshop CS2 and it
has all the bells and whistles but maybe your package has something similar. It is somewhat
of a basic imaging enhancement feature. It might be called something else so search the
help feature for masking to see what is available.

TBP

 

[Chris]

I use the free IrFanView to do all my resize work. It has a great resampler that avoids a lot of the problems. My Avatar is resized from a 10mp image.

IrFanView has a whole bunch of other things it can do too, so it's a nice tool to have. Be sure to get the EXIF add-on so that you can see all the details your digital camera adds to the photo file.

http://www.irfanview.com/

One thing I love is the batch processor. I can set up thousands of photos (say, my son's whole first year) and convert them to something small enough to burn onto a single CD but still retain enough detail to print so I can give the grandparents all the stuff they demand. (^_^)

Use all the tricks in making the images. I especially like using the Depth of Field to 'blur' the backgrounds.

 

[Snapshot]

Having good software for post processing really does do wonders. I also have CS2 and can't say enough good things about it. It's so complex that it seems like every time I use it, I learn something new. Well worth every penny... and I don't say that about a lot of software.